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Tuesday, October 11, 2016

Hitman (2016) - Episode 9 - Lights, Camera, Moose!?

Welcome to Marrakesh, where we stop a government coup just because someone would lose money if it went through.

Marrakesh is roughly the same size of Sapienza, but it never gives off that the impression that it's as big. There's a good reason for that.

In Sapienza, there was a fairly large and sprawling town and a manor within that town, with a laboratory underneath it. All three of these zones were woven pretty tightly together, and there are several ways to move from one zone into the other. Though there were distinctions between each location, they were pretty blurry and loose.

However, Marrakesh operates slightly differently. There is that same separation of zones, but it feels a lot more concrete. Where players in Sapienza can almost accidentally transition from one sphere of influence to another, it's hard to say the same about Marrakesh. The level almost forms a triangle, with the bazaar, consulate, and military camp each forming a single vertex of it. Lines between each one guarded and tightly funneled. If I drew a similar shape for Sapienza, it would be much more complicated.

That's not necessarily bad, but it's a interesting approach when all the other levels up until Morocco were much less restricting. Compared to Sapienza, Morocco is less loved by the player base, and some even call it the "worst level of the game". I don't really have an opinion either way, but it's funny that even the "worst level" is still miles above a lot of the terrible part of Blood Money and other titles in the series.